A personal work journal

Binding CapsLock in Windows

I wanted to re-use my useless CapsLock key to search Google. I started by modifying WinUrl, an old program I’d used forever. Seemed easy enough, just RegisterHotKey(..., VK_CAPITAL). It even seemed to somehow suppress the capital locking function, all done! Except not, some confusing thing happened where caps would be on in some windows, off in others.

I went down a rabbit hole trying to disable caps locking. It’s buried deep in the drivers somewhere in Windows. The recommended work around is to use SendInput() to fake a new CapsLock keystroke to toggle it back, or maybe SetKeyboardState() to obliterate the CapsLock bit. But about the time I was putting 2 second delays in my code to prevent recursion from triggering my own functions, I gave up on that approach.

I ended up using AutoHotKey instead with this script. I don’t like AutoHotKey, it’s way overengineered. Custom scripting language, custom compiler to native code?! But it’s also very capable. And it knows how to override CapsLock.